Meharry Data Science Center

Amy M. Andrade, MS, is the Senior Advisor to the President on Technology & Innovation,
Assistant Vice President for Research at Meharry Medical College. Amy serves as the
Founding Director of the Data Science Center and provides leadership to ensure it
achieves its core objectives. In addition to Ms. Andrade, there is an inter-collaborative
team of faculty and staff around this initiative:

• Teaching – The DSC is collaborating with Meharry's schools of dentistry, graduate studies
and research and medicine to develop a curricular "thread" that utilizes inter-professional
education and small group learning. This thread provides an introduction to the concepts
of big data science, precision medicine, and population health management. Learners
develop the basic competencies to understand the impact of "big data" on their individual
disciplines.

• Research – The DSC brings together the major data sources at Meharry into a structured data
ecosystem to allow aggregation, integration, and analysis. The data resources draw
from more than 25 sources in the schools of medicine, dentistry and graduate studies
and research. The data will be housed in a cloud storage environment that will facilitate
aggregation and will provide a valuable data lake utilizing hadoop as the infrastructure
framework. We have contracted with Clearsense, a company that specializes in data
management analytics, to build the data ecosystem in which all of the data and analytics
will reside.

• Support of clinical operations – The DSC incorporates clinical data from the outpatient faculty practices of Meharry
and from Nashville General Hospital. These data cover a significant percentage of
the population in the greater Nashville area and provide insights into the care and
factors that contribute to health inequities. Using the cloud storage environment,
the DSC will be able to add this to information from various biorepositories and genomic
data to provide a robust opportunity to apply big data analytic techniques to the
problem of health inequity.

• Public health – The DSC has aggregated the data from the "public health exposome." The exposome
database incorporates publicly available health and environmental data at the neighborhood
level. This data includes air quality metrics, crime statistics, information on access
to affordable housing, violence, poverty and availability of grocery stores, liquor
stores or other retail outlets. This dataset has been used to examine the socioenvironmental
and social determinants of health triggers for various chronic diseases.